The Benefits Of Doing It Yourself

There are people, many of them, who make a living from training dogs. They will take your dog for a period of time each week and teach it commands, behaviors and tricks that will make you clasp your hands in joy, and yet the thing about this is that most people don’t want to do things that way. As much fun as it may be to inherit a dog who will behave like you’d always dreamed a dog could behave, it takes away something that should be there between humans and dogs – the connection that makes humans and dogs such great partners in crime (metaphorically).

It takes longer to train a dog if you have no experience of doing it, and this is why many people are prepared to part with hard-earned cash to allow a professional to train their pet. For some of us, this kind of expense is prohibitive, and for others it may be more than affordable but a needless waste. We want to train our dogs, ourselves, because they are ours. Where is the fun in leaving it to someone else?

There is also the fact that in training your dog, you build a bond with it. many dogs will react strongly to their masters’ voice, while not paying heed to the same commands from others. Although a professional dog trainer will take every care to ensure that your dog learns the command and not the voice, there is undeniably something important about being the one from whom your dog learns to sit, stay and roll over. It is the all-important connection.

Steer Clear of Over-Punishing Your Dog

There are some people who feel that fear is the best motivator – period. If you want someone to act in a certain way and eschew other behaviors, you will often use the “stick” approach. This works in a fairly simple way – you make clear what you want to happen, and threaten negative results if the outcome is not to your taste. If the outcome then falls short of what you had hoped, you follow through with your threat. The person then becomes aware that your threat was genuine, and resolves to take you seriously.

The same process is often applied to training a dog. If the dog transgresses in some way, it will be punished. Often this will take the form of a physical punishment such as striking the dog. If this method is applied frequently enough, it will filter through that the behavior and the punishment are linked. Eventually, or sooner, the dog will make the link in its brain and cease the negative behavior. However, it may also come to see you as its punisher rather than its friend.

The key is to not over-punish your dog. It is simply not accurate to say that fear is the greatest motivator. Anyone who has seen the effects of excessive physical punishment on a dog cannot fail to see how the results can be hugely negative. It may resist the instinct to transgress, but equally it will not want to do anything at all. And a dog which behaves well, but loses its vitality, says more about its trainer than anything else.

Rewarding Your Dog Is Important

Part of dog training, an important part, is knowing when and how to reward your dog. The concept of positive reinforcement is an important element of training any animal, and dogs have a mentality which responds well to this type of action. While a human may look for ulterior motives in any reward system – and openly rebel against such actions – a dog will simply see that there is a connection between “good” behavior and good results. This is why positive reinforcement is a necessary part of training any dog.

It works as follows: You want your dog to learn how to respond to a certain command. By repeating that command until the dog carries out the action, you create a link in your dog’s brain between the command and the action. When the dog responds to the command by performing the action, you then reward it by giving it a treat. The link is then strengthened in the dog’s brain. Command + Action = Treat. The dog will become willing to respond to your command, knowing that the results will be in its favor.

It can take time to make this message stick. Some dogs are less amenable to training than others – just as all humans are different, so are all dogs. But just as all humans have instinctive ways of responding to stimuli, so do all dogs. It is essential that you give your dog time to work out the right way to react to your training. The benefits will quickly become evident.